Critics brand Morsi new ‘pharaoh,’ set party offices on fire

AFP, CAIRO

Sat, Nov 24, 2012 - Page 1

Protesters torched Muslim Brotherhood offices yesterday, state media said, as supporters and opponents of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi staged rival rallies across the nation a day after he assumed sweeping powers.

The offices of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, were set ablaze in the canal cities of Ismailiya and Port Said, state television said. An FJP official said the party’s office was also stormed in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, where clashes broke out between rival demonstrators.

In Cairo, an array of liberal and secular groups, including activists at the forefront of the protest movement that forced former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak from power early last year, planned to march on Tahrir Square, Cairo’s iconic protest hub, to demonstrate against the “new pharaoh.”

Morsi’s backers, led by the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, gathered outside the presidential palace in north Cairo in a show of support for his decision to temporarily place his decisions above judicial oversight.

“The people support the president’s decisions,” the crowd chanted.

Morsi was mulling an address to the nation defending his decision later in the day, aides said.

On Thursday, the president undercut a hostile judiciary that had been considering whether to scrap an Islamist-dominated panel drawing up a new constitution, stripping judges of the right to rule on the case or to challenge his decrees.

The decision effectively places the president above judicial oversight until a new constitution is ratified.

Morsi’s opponents poured into Tahrir Square after the main weekly Muslim prayers.

They were expected to be joined by leading secular politicians Mohamed ElBaradei, a former UN nuclear watchdog chief, and Amr Mussa, a former foreign minister and Arab League head.

“This is a coup against legitimacy ... We are calling on all Egyptians to protest in all of Egypt’s squares on Friday,” Sameh Ashour, head of the lawyers’ syndicate, said in a joint news conference with ElBaradei and Mussa.

ElBaradei denounced Morsi as a “new pharaoh,” the same term of derision used against Mubarak when he was in power.

Morsi assumed his sweeping new powers in a decree read out by his spokesman Yasser Ali on state television on Thursday.

“The president can issue any decision or measure to protect the revolution,” it said.

“The constitutional declarations, decisions and laws issued by the president are final and not subject to appeal,” it said.

In his pronouncement, Morsi also ordered “new investigations and retrials” in cases involving the deaths of protesters, a decision that could net military top brass and other former Mubarak regime officials.

The declaration is aimed at “cleansing state institutions” and “destroying the infrastructure of the old regime,” the president’s spokesman said.

A senior official of the Justice and Freedom Party, the Brotherhood’s political arm, said Morsi’s decision was necessary to guarantee the revolution was on course.